1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a machine or apparatus for splitting wooden logs into small pieces useful as firewood. More specifically, the present invention relates to a vehicle mounted wood splitter operated by hydraulic pressure to force the cut wood logs through a splitting wedge which splits the cut log into a desired number of pieces.
2. Description of Related Art
The vast majority of woodsplitters to which the present invention is directed generally employ a ram-type mechanism which forces a “blocked” piece of wood of some maximal length into a stationary splitting wedge having sharpened edges. As the blocked piece or cut log is axially advanced into the wedge, the log is split into a plurality of sector-shaped pieces along cleavage lines that are generally directed radially with respect to the center axis and along medullar rays of the cut log. Typical examples of such devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,077,214, 3,862,651, 4,371,019, 4,431,362, 5,337,810 and 5,957,175.
The diameter of the logs fed to the splitting wedge may vary greatly. The industry ideal is to split logs so that the resulting split pieces are of a uniform size. Pieces too large in size result in customers having to manually split their wood further, whereas pieces that are too small in size cannot be used efficiently. In order to maintain this uniform size, larger diameter logs must be cut into a greater number of pieces than smaller diameter logs. In the course of cutting a sequence of logs, it often happens that logs of widely different diameters are encountered, thereby requiring frequent adjustment of the apparatus so that the appropriate number of pieces are generated from each log. Such adjustment of the apparatus to accommodate varying sized logs requires considerable operator time and down time of the machine, thereby increasing the cost of the log splitting operation.
The prior art includes wood splitting machines that have interchangeable wedges to accommodate different sized logs that necessitate manual removal and change of one size wedge to another. Such changeover of the different wedges, however, causes the operator to cease production temporarily with resultant lost operator time and machine down time. Other wood splitting machines include wedges on a pillar type mechanism that allows the operator to raise more wedges when the diameter of the log is larger. This type of equipment, however, frequently results in increased small waste pieces.
What is needed in the art is a wood splitter which can be quickly adjusted to the desired wedge size so that logs of varying size can be split into a uniform size with a minimum of adjustment time both for the operator and the machine.